The first scientific research took place in 1969 and was published in 1970 in Science Magazine (which is one of the world's top academic journals). By my latest count, there have been 340 peer-reviewed articles published on TM, many of which have appeared in highly respected journals. For those unfamiliar with scientific publishing, peer-reviewed means that each article is subjected to scrutiny by independent reviewers who are authorities in their field. - Dr Norman Rosenthal in Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation, 2011, p14.

“John would have been the first one now, if he had been there, to recognise and acknowledge what Maharishi has done for the world and appreciate it" - Yoko Ono (2008) "This is one of the few things that has been given to me in my life that has real value to me." - Paul McCartney (2009)" “That was the main thing through the sixties I got into India. I think that was the ONE thing in my life, I could have done without everything else "- George Harrison (1987) "It gives me great pleasure to be part of this evening. I feel the aims of this charity [David Lynch Foundation which raises funds to teach one million at-risk children to meditate] are wonderful!" - Ringo Starr (2009)

"Everybody has a birthright to enjoy abiding peace and unbounded joy, which is the essential nature of his own soul. And I hold that everybody already possesse the capacity of enjoying it, because it is already there in the innermost recess of everybody's heart." -- Maharishi

Can group meditation bring World Peace? Quantum Physicist, John Hagelin explains

Dr John Hagelin:

I am going to show you very quickly some of the early research, this is the first study and I won't go into great detail except to say that this experiment was performed in the Middle East during the peak of the Lebanon War in the early 1980's.
It was hypothesized, based on many previous smaller experiments that if enough people were collectively experiencing and stimulating this fundamental powerful field of peace within, that there would be a radiated influence of peace that would affect the behavior of people throughout society. People would wake up in the morning and they'd decide "Hey, I don't think I'm going to kill anybody today."

What a novel thought, that, you know, with some expanded comprehension and less narrowly cramped, narrowly self-centered, acutely stressed vision that those desperate acts of terrorism simply don't really have a fertile field to fall on.

So,this chart shows a dotted line going up and down, which is the rise and fall on a daily basis of the number of people who were meditating as a group in Jerusalem. About a thousand people on average, sometimes more, sometimes less.
And the solid line represents progress towards peace in the war in neighboring Lebanon.
And even before the benefit of statistical analysis, you can almost see from the raw data, that progress towards peace – measured by reduced war deaths, reduced war injuries, reduced number of bombs – that progress towards peace goes up and down almost in lock-step with the number of people who were meditating as a group radiating this influence of inner peace, to become outer peace.
When this was subject to mathematical analysis, the likelihood that this is simply due to some fluke, due to chance,is less than one part in 10,000.
To be able to say something with this certainty, that group meditation prevented war, that is a really remarkable finding.
When this was published in the Yale University Journal of Conflict Resolution, it ignited a firestorm.
First of all it took two years to publish the paper because the editors reviewed it and reviewed it and reviewed it, and they said in the end: “This paper is unassailable”.
This paper was performed at a status a standard of scientific rigor far beyond that required for publication in any journal.
So they had to publish it, but they published it with a letter. The letter in the journal said: “The results of this experiment are so unexpected, that a thousand people could influence the behavior of a million”, that they urge other scientists to go out and repeat this study. And that’s exactly what happened over the next two and a quarter years. Seven other scientific collaborations went out, and repeated the study; training in assembling groups of meditators practicing Transcendental Meditation, and in every one of these experiments, during this two and a quarter years period, there was a marked reduction in violence and war, 80% drop in war death, and war-related injuries in comparison to all the other days, during the two and a quarter years, where there were no meditating groups, when the situation grew slightly worse, as this chart shows...in comparison to seven highly positive bars, showing highly statistically significant progress towards peace, in every single experiment.

If you put these together, the likelihood that this reduction of war was again simply due to chance, and not due to the meditating groups was less than 1 part in ten million, million, million.

There is far more evidence that group meditation can turn off war like a light switch, than there is evidence that Aspirin reduces headache pain for example. It is a scientific fact.